When you talk to Michele Esposito, Capri designer, you understand how the essence of beauty, art and creativity is present in the DNA of many island entrepreneurs.

“You have to travel the world,” Michele is convinced, “acquire professionalism, and when return to Capri, with your own vision, create models inspired by beauty always with a touch of madness outside the globalized schemes”.

Yes, it’s true. Michele Esposito, art-director of Laboratorio – Capri, a boutique factory just a few steps from Via Camerelle, is a nomadic visionary who, working between Tokyo, London and New York, has realized that the secret and charm of the island’s colors, blue, green and yellow, can be perceived in the changing shades of the rock and nature of Capri.

But it was Mare Moda of the 1970s that gave the imprinting that conditioned his future. “I was a child and the memories of that explosion of colors, the beauty of the models and the joyful madness of the public are an indelible memory in my mind.”

Michele grew up with his brother Augusto in the tailor’s shop of his father Gigino and mother Maria Luisa, frequented by the imaginative humanity that populated Capri’s “Dolce Vita”.

As soon as he came of age he left the island to attend the European Institute of Design, Fashion and Visual Arts in Milan and then the Faculty of Sociology in Pavia. During these years of training, coming into contact with the dynamics of marketing of the big brands, he understands that only by returning to Capri will he be able to express his identity, to make his imagination explode volcanically. “My research on the image of Capri expressed in art, starts from afar, but, day after day, I try to create a modern, innovative designer, outside the standardized clichés of Capri.”

All models and materials are created in the Laboratorio Capri and by artisans throughout Italy. Everything is strictly “Made in Italy”.

But it is Michele’s pop, transgressive soul that is his winning weapon.

“Too much harmony disturbs me, I always look for a discordant element in my creations, to make each of my models modern and personal” But like all visionaries he has a dream – “I would like to recreate Mare Moda in Certosa of S. Giamcomo with all the artisans and young designers of Capri and a tailoring and design school for young people“.

The dreams of that child who saw the models parading at the Certosa of S. Giacomo are slowly becoming reality.